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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (July 3, 2014)
MUSIC BY BRETT CAMPBELL BACH BEAT More highlights from the Oregon Bach Festival T his time each year, Eugene respectfully steps back and offers the stage to the Oregon Bach Festival. And no wonder: The 44-year-old classical music institution abounds with so many attractive performances, workshops, lectures and other events that we couldn’t even begin to cover them all in last week’s issue. Here’s a rundown of some remaining top recommendations. Wilson, the great young tenor Nicholas Phan and bass Tyler Duncan, accompanied by pianist David Riley. 7:30 pm Sunday, July 6, at Beall Concert Hall 7:30 pm Tuesday, July 8, at the Hult Center’s Silva Concert Hall Discovery Series This summer offers a clear chance to see the differences as well as the similarities between Helmuth Rilling, who created this ingeniously enlightening combination lecture- demonstration-concert-conductor training workshop, and his successor. Halls will lead a session devoted to one of SOPRANO TAMARA WILSON PERFORMS JULY 6 AT BEALL CONCERT HALL 7:30 pm Thursday, July 3, at Beall Concert Hall Strauss Soirée II It may seem odd to schedule two concerts of late Romantic chamber music at a festival nominally devoted to much earlier Baroque music, particularly since the composer best known for the dramatic opening theme in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey specialized in megalo-musical forces in his operas and tone poems. The concert features some of Strauss’s hundreds of songs, performed by a strong cast of singers — soprano Tamara Stangeland Family Youth Choral Academy Anton Armstrong returns to lead the seven dozen young voices in music by Mozart, world premieres by David Childs and Rollo Dilworth and other 20th-century music, classical and non — plus a Bach cantata led by Rilling. 7:30 pm Wednesday, July 9, at First United Methodist Church Duke Ellington and the Harlem Jazz Craze As with Strauss and Rachmaninoff, we could probably stretch hard enough to find some kind of connection between Bach and America’s greatest man of music, but why bother? As we’re oft reminded by The Shedd, Ellington is simply responsible for a sizable chunk of America’s greatest 20th-century music. Art Abrams’ Swing Machine Big Band performs many of the classics from “The Mooche” to “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” with narration by Jamie Bernstein. Jonathan Manson, Cello J.S. Bach’s six suites for solo cello are among the most plangent music ever written. We still marvel at how he could make a single instrument express such profound emotion. Manson, one of Europe’s finest cellists, will play three of Bach’s immortal suites and rarely heard music by one of his predecessors, the 17th-century Bolognese composer Domenico Gabrielli. Robert Levin in 1993, which hews closer to Mozart’s ideas and just sounds better than the often clumsy completion made by one of the dead composer’s students. Bach’s most famous cantatas, Christ Lay in Death’s Bonds (July 3) using a Baroque ensemble, while Rilling leads the July 7 and 10 shows with the OBF orchestra, featuring Bach’s Ascension Oratorio and Cantata 172. Either way, you’re bound to learn plenty. 4:30 pm July 3, 7 and 10, at the Hult Center’s Soreng Theater Rilling Conducts Mozart The festival’s venerable founder returns to lead two of Mozart’s late-career masterpieces: the dark, dramatic Symphony No. 40 and the mighty Requiem he never quite finished; happily, we’ll hear the completion made by 7:30 pm Friday, July 11, at the Hult Center’s Silva Concert Hall Verdi Requiem When the great Italian poet Manzoni died in 1873, the country’s greatest composer decided to write a major requiem (the Latin mass for the dead) to honor him, and its premiere in Milan a year later became a national event. Verdi even took it on tour to London, Paris and Vienna. People cared about poets then. Not surprisingly for one of the great opera composers, this great religious work brims with drama. 3 pm Sunday, July 13, at the Hult Center’s Silva Concert Hall THURSDAYS AT THE OLD PAD 4A 3355 E. AMAZON EUGENE OR 541-686-5022 NEVER A COVER W . O . W . HALL H H H H H H H H H H COMMUNITY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS ON THE CORNER OF EIGHTH & LINCOLN ALL AGES H WOWHALL.ORG H H H H H H H H H H eugeneweekly.com • July 3, 2014 29
